Why there might not be enough Raspberry Pi to go around

http://www.thesinglestep.org/thoughts/rspi/

by noonespecial • 15 years ago

88 28 15 years ago

Zuzz• 15 years ago

how is not being able to serve everyone who wants to buy one a problem?

This is a charity with a very clear goal:

"promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing"

as long as they can achieve that they are a success and not being a business means they can gladly "ignore" everyone else.

I really want one (or three) but if they are hit but astonishing demand and decide to give priority to those who will serve they overall purpose the best and not me I'm fine with it. I will not start complaining all over the interweb and accuse them of being a failure.

v21• 15 years ago

Nothing would be better for the educational community than for there to be a much larger community making cheap extensions, how-to guides, tutorials and libraries for it.

noonespecial4• 15 years ago

Please don't get me wrong here. I in no way think that they're going to be failures, no matter how it turns out. That they're come this far at all already makes them heroes in my book.

Of course they are free to make whatever they want for whomever they want. If they choose to make them from solid gold and sell them to schools for a nickel, good on them.

All I'm saying is that I think an embedded computer that cost so little but still runs the software and has the features of the larger computers that most everyone knows how to program is a bit of a revolutionary idea.

Theoretically, if the demand is present, someone will be willing to fill it, but this is not a product space that DLink or Netgear is likely to explore. It would be a shame if they do indeed reach the limits of their production, prioritize as you suggest, and then we are unable to find out this go around whether the demand was there for 1000 more than they made or 100,000 more.

Like Arduino, the closer they come to getting one into everyone's hands that can create with them, the more valuable they become to everyone.

jerf• 15 years ago

Because if they actually build to demand and make some money in the process, they will be in a far better position to meet their educational goals than if they deliberately hobble themselves. Failing to take advantage of people throwing money at them is positioning themselves for failure. However good and fuzzy that may make you feel, in the real world they will be failing to accomplish their goals to the extent that the could have, and I for one think that trumps fuzzy feelings about not sullying one's hands so they could serve thousands instead of millions. YMMV, I suppose.

rc55• 15 years ago

I have felt for a long time that Raspberry Pi would be something far beyond the scope of education and could well be re-purposed as a super-economical Arduino equivalent, complete with its own ecosystem of add-on boards, enclosures, power supplies and applications.

Could I see myself getting at least one? Most definitely. I'd pay double for what it offers, and all my hacker friends agree. There's so much we'd love to dig into, set-top boxes, surveillance, emulation and gaming, jukeboxes, audio synthesis, demoscene productions... it's just a fantastic platform I can't wait to get my hands on.

I think they may well deliver on this regardless of any scepticism, although over time it will be at least exciting to see what kind of community is developed.

My only slight concern is whether it will encroach on Broadcom's business too much, perhaps they will constrain orders to set amounts so commercial applications are prohibited, or at least artificially constrained and referred further up the supply chain. That said, it does open up the market more for a similar device.

I do appreciate the fact it is a relatively static specification though - write once, run everywhere is a great place to be.

justincormack• 15 years ago

There are plans for other similar boards in the works eg

http://rhombus-tech.net//allwinner_a10/orders/

Which is higher spec, cheaper and has full source.

noonespecial4• 15 years ago

I saw that. I sure hope so. I'd feel a great deal better if the product was more circuit board and less photoshop.

I'd say the Raspberry Pi folks have 6 months, maybe even a year on these guys.

obtu• 15 years ago

Too much demand is a good problem to have. Raspberry Pi is certainly counting on mass production to meet their target price; and if people still want more, competitors will spring up.

ChuckMcM2• 15 years ago

Not really, too much demand you can't respond to can ruin your reputation and your customer base. Its ok if you've planned for it, not so much if you get taken by surprise.

ndefinite2• 15 years ago

I was going to disagree with you but you might have a point, it's not open source: http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs#comment-2220

ndefinite2• 15 years ago

wait, is it? The link I pasted was them commenting about the GPU but I can't find a reference anywhere saying whether or not the PCB design is open or closed source

noonespecial4• 15 years ago

I can't find the link at the moment but they did release their previous micro-controller based board but I also read that they would not be releasing the design of the current model.

gravitronic2• 15 years ago

open source or not, did you know you can't buy this chip? Broadcom only sells it to their partners that can do 100k+/yr quantity.

EwanToo• 15 years ago

I'm not sure there's the absolutely massive untapped demand that is being suggested from hobbyists, though it is going to sell a lot to them (in the 10,000s, maybe more).

I picked up a BeagleBone[1] last week, made by Texas Instruments for £60, which has significantly more CPU power than the Raspberry, 256MB of RAM and has embedded Ethernet (so is more comparable to the $35 model).

So while D-Link and Netgear aren't exploring this area, TI definitely are, and are very much in a position to roll out millions of these devices if the demand is there.

However I think the Raspberry Pi exists in it's current form to drive demand for a bulk order from governments as an educational tool, and if someone ordered either the BeagleBone or Raspberry Pi for every 10 year old child then I think that would be a brilliant step.

[1] http://beagleboard.org/bone

genbattle• 15 years ago

Looking at the Beaglebone, it seems to have a very different target market to the Raspberry Pi; judging from the single USB port, the lack of display adapter and the large number of GPIO pins, one would say the Beaglebone is primarily aimed at hackers, particularly hardware hackers. The Pi on the other hand is aimed at getting people into programming and teaching general computer skills to those who otherwise couldn't afford a computer.

I couldn't see my parents figuring out how to get a Beagleboard hooked up to their TV and surfing the net, but I could definitely see them doing this with a Raspberry Pi unit.

I'm sure I have heard of another board recently that was neither the Pi nor the Beagleboard that had similar specs to the Pi in terms of design, but used the same A8 as the beagleboard, clocked at 1.5GHz or something. But that project was just in its infancy, so won't be available till next year. I'm somewhat sceptical because they're throwing around specs like >1GB of NAND flash, >1GB DDR3-800, etc. for 40% less cost than the Pi.

EDIT: Someone linked it below, Rhombus Tech, using some Chinese-manufactured chip.

gravitronic2• 15 years ago

I agree the demand will be high, and especially at release it will be impossible to find a board.

However this group is tied tightly with Broadcom and are going to be able to deal in high volume. Even if they end up wholesaling to digikey for $25, and we pay a markup, it will still be a great deal and I have no doubt, a success.

divtxt• 15 years ago

Slightly off-topic: are there any Linux options between a $25 Raspberry Pi and a $200-$300 Atom-based nettop?

noonespecial4• 15 years ago

I'd go with a $149 BeagleBoard-XM if you want the DVI, or an $89 beaglebone if you don't need video.

lgeek• 15 years ago

For $149 I'd rather get an i.MX53 Quick Start Board with Cortex-A8 @ 1 GHz / 1GB DDR3 RAM / SATA(!) / 1080p video decoder / VGA / Ethernet / USB.

I agree about BeagleBone, it's a great choice if you don't need video or too much RAM, and it includes a JTAG adapter.

pingswept• 15 years ago

If you're looking to use a Linux board for web stuff in the Arduino ecosystem, there's the Rascal (disclosure: which I built): http://rascalmicro.com . If you expect to be compiling your own kernel and that sort of thing, the Beagleboard is slightly cheaper, as noted in another comment.

diminish• 15 years ago

cheapness may open new frontiers. 10(or more)-pack raspis available at your local store at the cash register next to the cigarettes may open new ways to computing where hackers and admins may install to places previously unplanned.

for example, i may feed my cat remotely and get a mobile webcam at home to by deploying several rasperries, some usb equipment and apt-get install and a full linux, or create a videochat only computer for gtalk sticked to the kitchen wall. instead of arduino, a standard pc, and usb may provide more values. of course battery will be a problem.

Palomides• 15 years ago

this seems rather pessimistic; while the initial run is 10,000 units, they have said things like "We have a very low fixed-cost base, and will break even when we reach sales of 20-30k units per year," which imply to me they have much higher goals than just the first run. And unlike many of the open source efforts around things like this in the past, it's being produced by experienced engineers with close ties to a large electronics corporation. Calling them "a non-profit from the UK focused on education" is pretty misleading. To even consider selling to the government via the education system suggests they're ready for serious scale.

kevinpet• 15 years ago

I'd love to learn what the story is, but this is too painful to read in 12px (i.e. 9pt) gray type.

Maybe, just maybe, if you're doing advertising, and you have a strong need for some specific look, tiny low contrast type may be appropriate. For anyone else, it only reduces the number of people who will read your content.

Would you go to a tech talk and do a mumbling Marlon Brando impersonation? I didn't think so. Please don't do the same in print.

ph0rque• 15 years ago

I used to complain about these things too, until I started using readability. Now nary a blog post gets read by me before I readability that sucka...

egypturnash• 15 years ago

I really hope this guy is wrong, because, like him, I have a bunch of project ideas kicking around that would be too frivolous for the time/money cost of an Arduino and some shields, or a Beagleboard/Gumstix/etc. When the price of doing something drops a zero, things change.

I mean, a hundred bucks and hours getting a rickety webserver stack to run is a huge investment for "controlling some LED mood lighting in my living room with my phone/pad/computer". But ~$30-40 for a Pi and a wifi dongle? That's still a little frivolous but whipping up a bit of C and PHP on top of Apache seems utterly trivial.

I want a handful of Pis SO BAD.

ChuckMcM2• 15 years ago

This is so true.

I could consume a million of these a month at that price point. Let that sink in. One million a month, 12 million a year. Its not even difficult, there are probably a half dozen ideas that can consume them in this quantity.

Why? Because I can put software on them and resell the package for $99. Going through distribution and giving them 40 points of margin and I'm still making better than 65% gross margins.

They are so not ready :-)

sireat• 15 years ago

Sadly, I have been saying the same thing that there will be a big shortage of Pis since I first heard about Pi and visited their forums this summer.

So far nothing has changed. Delayed production, initial production run of 10k. It is being run as a hobbyist project(I am judging mostly from the Pi forums). Hobbyist project is not a bad thing, just not what the market is asking of this device.

At the moment, it seems like one mid-level guy at Broadcom, got some company support and got volunteers to help out.

Only saving grace would be, if someone higher up in Broadcom gets behind the project. The problem is that Broadcom does not want to really make these devices, it wants to sell its chips to manufacturers (who are unlikely to see much profit in making $25 devices when they can sell $100 devices)

Think Asus EEE line and how it trended upwards pricewise and netbooks in general..

All that said, the future is a bit rosier. Once the initial fixed R&D costs are amortized, we will see plenty of inexpensive devices like this in the next 2-3 years.

Why there might not be enough Raspberry Pi to go around

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